


Exercises in Latitudinal Thinking

by Janet Carter (janet_carter)



Category: Sneakers (1992)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janet_carter/pseuds/Janet%20Carter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Nic</p>
    </blockquote>





	Exercises in Latitudinal Thinking

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Nic

 

 

**1988**

To pull off a sneak, you need to be able to think on your feet, with a certain amount of flexibility, not to mention balls. Martin Bishop is currently relying on the assumption that his will kick in and get him out of this office without setting off the alarm, any minute now. He hasn't always been so hot at this part. Of course, he also hasn't always professionally broken into places guarded by people who may not want him there. He spent two years sleeping on friends' couches and picking up odd jobs to get by, and seven years programming security software for a money management firm in Vancouver. It wasn't until he came to San Francisco that he realized that he'd gotten pretty good at improvising and went into business for himself.

Now he's putting those skills into action, sitting here and playing Reversi like he works here, waiting for the janitor to come back and open the door.

This desk looks like a guy who never works late, a few folders lined up almost straight in a rack marked "Awaiting action", the inbox empty except for some dust. There are pictures of a wife and four towheaded kids, outside of a Swiss ski chalet, on a Caribbean-looking beach, rafting through the Grand Canyon. This is an employee who's paid well to do not a lot of work, and Marty's decided to bet that the janitor, who comes by between 10:15 and 10:45 every night, has never seen the guy. So as far as Janitor Bob knows, Marty is someone with every right to be here; he's just working later than usual. With the alarm set, because he's maybe a little scared of intruders after everyone else leaves. Of course, he _does_ have every right to be there, but explaining why to the janitor, or to the security guard downstairs, would kind of defeat the purpose.

9:58. Bishop clicks in the upper left corner, and here comes the janitor – and it's not Janitor Bob, it's some other guy, but no problem, he can work with that; it might even be better. Not-Bob is a little stockier, with floppy brown hair, wearing a gray jumpsuit. He looks a little too interested in the trash he's emptying out of the wastebaskets, but that's not Bishop's problem. His problem is that there's no way he can get to the door without shoving this guy out of the way and giving him a good look at his face. He decides to act natural and keep trying to pass for a forgettable employee. He's casually sauntering towards the door and – fuck! – he knocks half a cup of cold coffee off the next desk; his left pants leg is spattered, and it's dripping all over the floor. He looks around for Kleenex or something, but why not ask the janitor?

"Hey, you got any paper towels over there?"

The janitor drops a sheaf of papers back onto a desk – okay, definitely something weird there – and turns to look at Bishop.

"Why do you think I would have paper towels?" And that's when Bishop notices the very small camera in the janitor's hand.

**1993**

It isn't the best time of year to visit Scotland, as it turns out, but Athens, crowds and pollution aside, is outstanding; they tour the Parthenon and all of the tourist sites, and they spend a few days outside of the city and talk in restaurants for hours, staring out over the Mediterranean.

Claudia wants to rent mopeds, and Crease finally gives in; it's another thing that they've never done together, and something that he sure as hell isn't going to do on a family trip, when his daughter would want to try it. He feels ridiculous at first, but it ends up being one of the best days of the trip. That, and the week in Tahiti.

Carl's first date with Mary is all right; he spends days asking everyone what the most romantic restaurant would be (that he can afford) and figuring out what to wear and what to say, since he can't talk about how they met or what they have in common so far. They meet at the little Italian place Carl selects. The waiter's right when he recommends the gnocchi, even if they're a little heavy for a first date, and the conversation is awkward, but not that bad.

On their second date, Mary takes him to the shooting range and lets him fire her MP5K personal defense weapon, and things pick up from there.

Whistler takes it on faith that Mr. Abbott is keeping his word. In the meantime, he's playing with some new toys; Janek's black box is a dangerous tool, but pieces of the technology inside have some interesting applications of their own. He turns a couple of them into a patent, which he's pretty sure no one's going to challenge, and licenses his new little blue box to a tech start-up in Silicon Valley.

They go under a few years later, but by that time, there are a lot of interested bidders, and Whistler makes out all right. He gives most of the profits to Oxfam and spends the rest on new toys.

Mother heads off in the Winnebago and spends weeks getting sidetracked by roadside attractions. He figures out the Mystery Spot pretty quickly and hangs around outside the gate explaining it to people; the tour guides notice and kick him out a couple of days later. Then he decides to make a thorough investigation of correlations between sightings of UFO-like meteorological phenomena and the quality of coffee at local diners throughout Nevada.

When he comes back to report his findings, he meets a guy at a bar who gives him a book deal to tell the inside story on the government's biggest cover-ups.

**1988**

Crease is getting tired of waiting in the car; he's finished the crossword, except for the lower left corner, and he doesn't do the Jumble. As he's said for a while, if they're going to take jobs like this, they need a better plan than "Martin wanders into the building, with the client's help, and sees what he can do." Maybe a bigger team, even if their fees don't go that far to begin with. So when Martin comes back with a goofy-looking guy in a jumpsuit, who starts running his mouth off the moment he gets into the car, Crease is willing to let his guard down and go with it, at least for now, although he regrets this once he hears the guy speculate about why they were all hired for the same job.

"Trust me when I say the KGB is very likely not involved," he finally interrupts.

"Believe what you want, but the evidence is very suggestive."

Martin brings them back. "Okay. Let's talk about those files."

**1994**

Bishop plans to keep on doing what he does; he's good at it, after all this time, and although he doesn't have to sneak in real life any more, he's in the habit and he might as well stay that way. He likes being Martin Bishop, and Martin Brice is long in the past by now. He didn't hear any news of Cosmo for a while after the Janek job, but he wondered, now and then. When a job that smelled like organized crime came along, he referred the client to another company, one that was better suited to their needs; it might have been overly cautious, but he'd rather stay on the safe side for once. He thought for a while that Cosmo was marshalling his forces to take over the world in some grand scheme, but this was reality, and the Cold War was staying over, and the world was a complicated place for evil super-geniuses. So, he keeps an eye out for secret messages in the Sunday crossword, just in case, but he's pretty sure it's over.

**1988**

It looks like they're in the middle of a merger and a divorce, and it's anyone's guess which one is messier. The wife hired Bishop and Crease to check on her new business partner's corporate security, telling them that the company was one hundred percent hers. Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-ex-husband wanted Mother to figure out how much of a cut he should be getting from the business. It also looks like Bishop was sitting at the business partner's brother-in-law's desk, and that his oldest daughter, a gawky sixteen-year-old in the latest picture, but now a leggy eighteen, may or may not be sleeping with the not-quite-ex-husband. This is a very good example of why Bishop isn't in the private eye business.

On the other hand, they still have a client or two with money for them, and while Bishop's pretty sure that the diskette in his briefcase is full of financials and confidential data, he can't actually get past the password himself. So they drive over to see this guy he knows and watch him play through the data on his Braille keyboard. After two minutes and forty-five seconds, Whistler is smiling.

"You'd think people would be a little more creative with their passwords." He continues reading the numbers as they scroll by. "And a little more careful with their money."

"So, I take it we can tell our client that the security has some flaws?

Crease is pacing behind Whistler's chair; Mother is examining the books on the far wall. He pulls a few out and runs his finger along the pages. Whistler laughs out loud. "We might not want to do that just yet," he says, scrolling through more pages of data.

"What did you find?" Bishop asks, peering over his shoulder.

"Let's just say that they're not making their money from the communications business."

Crease glances over at Mother. "Martin, are we sure that he needs to hear whatever we're about to hear?"

"Yeah, he's fine. Whistler, where's the money coming from?"

"Oh, just a little ways offshore; I'm working on a trace." The modem dials and connects; keys clicking, modem humming, and – "There it is! Oh, that's interesting."

They all waited for a beat. "What?" Bishop asks.

"Any idea who David Bixby is?"

"It rings a bell, but I can't quite place it," Bishop says.

"He's bankrolling something through these people; I would guess drugs, but maybe just old-fashioned money laundering – there's cash going all over the place, Aruba, Switzerland, back and forth between Mexico and Arizona; actually, I wouldn't be surprised if –"

"Goddamn it!" Bishop grabs his coat. "Come on, we're going back."

**1996**

Cosmo once thought Marty Brice was pretty cool. They were in the same freshman engineering study group, and while Cosmo understood how to derive the formulas with greater facility than Marty did, Marty pulled a better score on the midterm. Cosmo believed that it was all due to Marty's ability to stay relaxed and figure out what he needed to do to get an answer to the problem. without getting distracted by why something worked. Cosmo persisted with engineering; Marty got bored and switched over to political science. The poli sci professors were socialists whom Marty could impress with glib ideas, but he complained about the papers and said that problem sets had been better. Then Cosmo's freshman roommate joined the football frat, and while Marty got along fine with his roommate, Cosmo's number for the housing draw was higher, and they ended up together for sophomore and then the first half of junior year.

In short, it was numbers that brought them together, the deliberately plotted numbers of engineering, and the apparently random numbers of the residential life department. Now that Cosmo thinks about it, those numbers were likely drawn by actual lots, or slips of paper; computer programming didn't come near any semblance of random number generation until years later.

On the other hand, the numbers that will bring them together one last time are easy enough for him to control. And so he finds himself sitting with his laptop at gate twenty-eight, concourse C, in O'Hare just after the announcement that Martin Bishop's flight back to San Francisco, at C27, has been delayed by twenty-five minutes. He sits and watches Marty as he stands up and heads for the men's room, glancing casually around the terminal. He has no doubt that Marty will spot and approach him.

"Cosmo." Marty's voice is even.

Cosmo closes his computer, places it on the seat next to him, and stands up, holding out a hand. "What a charming coincidence."

"Is it?" Marty asks. "I was wondering if I'd see you again. After we parted on such good terms last time."

"Indeed. After all, you're the one played that little joke on me." The next flight to Boston begins boarding.

"Did you come here to give me a hard time about that?"

"Marty. If I wanted revenge, would I have picked someplace with so many measures to keep out handguns?"

"You always liked a challenge. And I assume you're not unprotected."

"You know me well, my friend. But metal detectors have the convenient characteristic of cutting down on the number of people who might have weapons in the building, which, considering some of my associates, gives me a certain feeling of comfort."

"You trust airport security, then?"

"As far as I can throw my bodyguard."

"It's good to see you, Cos." Marty's voice is careful; he probably thinks Cosmo is unstable, a homicidal megalomaniac. He's right, but that's not the point of this meeting. "What do you want?"

"Perhaps I just wanted to see you again. My business takes me out of the country for extended periods; it can be lonely."

"That's not a bad reason," Marty says. "But I don't exactly trust your word any more."

"Also, I wanted to give you something." Cosmo holds out two fists; Marty taps the right one, which Cosmo to reveal a quarter. He looks over Marty's shoulder. "That's your flight." Marty nods and backs up a couple of steps.

"Goodbye, Cosmo. I'll see you around."

Cosmo watches him head for the plane. Marty's tossing the quarter in the air; Cosmo puts his hands in his pockets, still holding the other quarter in his left hand.

**1988**

Whistler tags along out of curiosity; Crease refuses to wait in the car unless Martin explains, and Martin decides it will be quicker to show than to tell. Mother disables the alarm and lets them all back into the office. Janitor Bob has been by to take out the trash and shut off the lights; they decide that it's better to stick with a flashlight. Bishop shines it over David Bixby's desk, pausing at each family picture.

"Switzerland. Aruba. And I'll bet that trip to Arizona even had a side jaunt to Mexico."

"He takes care of business on family vacations?" Mother asks.

"Looks that way; wonder if his brother-in-law is in on the game," Bishop says.

Crease stares at him. "Does that matter to us?"

"No, probably not."

"And is this the kind of thing that we might want to report to the police?"

Bishop considers for a moment before answering. "I think we can suggest that our client should have another audit done; maybe they'd find some different numbers this time."

"I think they just might," Whistler says, waving a disk in the air.

"At which point my client's question will probably become irrelevant," Mother says. "I think I'll give him a full report and invoice tomorrow."

"A report on?"

"The business's income, as based on what I found in my investigations early tonight. Money-laundering aside, they're doing great."

"Hey, does anyone else hear that beeping?" Whistler asks. They pause and, one by one, turn to look at the alarm panel. It's flashing red.

"Mother, how did you deal with the auto-arm on the alarm?" Crease asks.

"Auto-arm?"

By the time they scramble down the fire escape and back to the car, the security team is almost there; they hightail it away for some pizza, and, a few beers later, they decide to go into business together.

**1997**

They're still doing jobs together – there's an implied understanding that they need the money, which is mostly bullshit, but they're good at it, and there have always been things that they don't explain to each other. They add on a newly-graduated math major, because she knows more than a little about cryptography, which seems to be a growth area in the private security business. Then there's a guy from the corporate sector, who has the numbers to back up Marty's charm during the sales pitch. They do a lot of work remotely now, hacking websites for pay. After business picks up, they redo the loft, with up-to-date workstations, some kick-ass vintage video games, and a few surprises in the areas of soundproofing and alarm circuitry, which they've learned something about over the years. Bishop still keeps an eye out for secret messages, wondering when Cosmo will turn up again, but mostly he doesn't really think about it. He's got his business, he's got his friends, and he's pretty good at adapting to whatever comes along.

 


End file.
